I've handled health coverage for Parenting magazine, WebMD, ShareCare.com, Caring.com, BabyCenter.com and for Kaiser Permanente and Blue Shield. As a writer, I've published stories in Fitness, More, Health, Real Simple, Self, Yoga Journal, and many other magazines and websites. With many years of experience, I've developed a unique perspective on how to take the latest health, nutrition, travel and beauty information and translate it into valuable tips and insights.

Holiday Overindulgence Got You Down? Blame Your 'Food Clock'

That pesky “holiday 10″ pounds that’s tipping the scales this week may be easier to lose than you think. To the rescue comes a new understanding of the role that our “food clock” plays in how our bodies respond to a sudden change in eating habits. (Like starting the evening with rich hors d’oevres at 5 p.m. or finishing up that last glass of eggnog at midnight.)

According to the study’s authors, when you suddenly begin indulging to excess, eating at different times of day than usual, or eating at night, it’s like you upset your food clock, and start the hands spinning.

The real scientific term for the food clock is the “food-entrainable oscillator,” which is the biochemical process (more like a set of signals) that keeps your metabolism chugging along at a consistent rate. In the long-ago past, our food clocks were controlled by the best daylight foraging and hunting hours. Now that we can eat whenever we want to, and change our eating patterns at will, the food clock has a harder time staying on top of things. Studies have shown that eating late at night, working night shifts, and jet lag all throw the food clock off, resulting in overeating and weight gain.

On a daily basis, it seems clear that the timing of meals plays a role in how much weight you gain. Past studies have shown that early risers are more likely to be thin than late-to-bed types. Jet lag makes you overeat, and graveyard shift workers face significant health risks including diabetes, obesity, heart attack and stroke from defying their natural circadian rhythms. And weight loss gurus are always saying that eating after 8 p.m. leads to weight gain – though luckily for us night owls, that one’s a myth.

But this study is the first to pinpoint a mechanism by which a major change in your schedule can affect how much you eat and how many of those extra calories go straight to your hips. According to the study’s lead researcher, neurologist Louis Ptacek, MD, understanding how a “desynchronized food clock” affects the body could lead to prevention measures for diabetes and obesity.

The science behind all this is rather complicated and, at the moment, fairly theoretical. The network of biochemical processes known as the food clock anticipates meal times and tells our bodies what to do with the nutrients about to be ingested. It seems that PTCy, when it binds with another protein called BMAL, stabilizes BMAL, which then shifts the clock. The research was done in mice, and compared how mice who lacked the PTCy protein reacted to being fed at night, vs. how normal mice reacted. (Normal mice woke up to eat, mice without PTCy slept through their feedings). Ptacek and his colleagues foresee ways in which understanding the molecular action of PTCy could lead to new ways to control the food clock and regulate metabolism despite shifts in the timing and amount of calories ingested.

If none of this sounds like it’s going to help you lose weight right now, I’m afraid you’re right. At the moment, Ptacek sees his research having the most direct applications for those who suffer from night eating disorder, difficulty with jet lag, and the problems associated with working graveyard shifts. But eventually, who knows – perhaps we could all avail ourselves with a treatment that would allow us to eat all we want from mid-November to January and be none the worse afterwards.

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Hi Alice, good comment, I’m not sure I fully understand the direct application of this research either. But yes, the body has a mechanism that reacts to changes in the timing of eating and resets the clock to control appetite and calorie usage and it seems that having a well-regulated clock is best for us.

Hey Melanie. Thanks for this. Cool science to help after the over-indulgences of the holiday season. I researched a lot of this while writing The 8-Hour Diet, a new take on the ancient health regime of fasting. Some really big brained docs at the Salk institute and the National Institute on Aging are both studying and following fasting regimes to manage weight and health issues. Maybe we can reprogram that clock ourselves?